The Ideal Diet– NaPodPoMo

In today’s episode, I want to talk about what I believe is the ideal for how we should be eating.  

First off, I believe that food, as nature intended it, is not our problem today. The problem is what we have done to it, and I talked in length about that in a prior episode. Too many people ask why healthy food is expensive, and I think we’re looking at it the wrong way. I think instead we need to look and ask why is fast food, and processed food, and junk food so cheap. That’s the key.  

So I want to talk about what ideal would be, and I’ll have to start with by telling you it is not 100 percent realistic in our world. If perhaps you lived, if you lived in a commune and never left, then it might work, but otherwise you’ll find yourself going out to eat and sharing meals with friends and not being able to always eat. eat the ideal foods. On the other hand, you’ll be eating a better diet overall. Do I eat this way? Well, it’s, it’s on my list of things that I strive to do. But like I said, it doesn’t always work out. And you know what? I’m only human.  

So I have to give you a warning here. If you start changing your diet and your relationship with these foods, The ones you maybe, you know, enjoy now, uh, you might discover later on that you don’t like them anymore. I have found that today I can often taste chemicals in some of the processed foods and even taste emptiness in like pasta when I used to eat that now I only eat the whole wheat.  

As a matter of fact, I have a story about a friend of mine who was telling me the story that he, um, he had been a fast food person for years and then he cleaned up his diet and whenever he had to travel, he would take food with him. And this one particular trip, a couple of hundred miles away from home, he was driving and he was hungry and he had to stop and the only thing around was McDonald’s. So he stopped at McDonald’s and he got the burger and the fries. And I don’t know, I think he got a Coke even. And, um, he got back on the road and he discovered that he couldn’t really even eat it because he was so used to not eating it. And I get that. I have the same issues.  

So in a nutshell, this is my philosophy on food. And the first thing I believe is that mother nature knows best when it comes to our foods. That as they come out of the ground or whatever the source, they are like what they should be. And realistically, we need to go back to what, well, people usually say, well, just like grandmother, you see, well, you know, grandmother is, is a relative timeline. And I like to think of when my grandmother, like prior to 1950, say what she cooked and ate.  

And if you think about it, when, as I tell you what’s in this ideal plan, you’ll see that it actually is how humans ate for most of their existence. Prior to the industrial revolution, everything people had to eat was within 150 miles or less of where they lived. And it was all these things, these qualities, it was all whole foods. It was very minimally processed. Actually, they did all the processing. It was by nature organic. It was also seasonal and local. And of course, it was foods without labels. And they only used traditional fats and oils. So let’s look at what those really mean.  

When I say whole foods, these are what we were intended to eat. When you start breaking your food down into pieces, you lose important synergies. A couple of examples, for one, an egg white by itself can be inflammatory. But the yolk has properties that can curb that inflammation, so when you eat a whole egg, you have the two working together instead of the egg white causing inflammation. Another one relates to extracting juice from a fruit. When you extract the juice, you remove and throw away the fiber. But the fiber serves to slow down the absorption of the sugar in the fruit. So a whole fruit would be less of a sugar high than the juice alone.  

Minimally processed. What I mean by that is, the fewer hands that touch food, the better. As a rule, I even consider the cut up veggies that some grocery stores now sell as being a processed food. But you’re also paying for that convenience.  

Organic, I believe more and more that we should be trying to find organic foods. We can avoid GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. We can get the animals that do not have artificial hormones in them.  

Organic certification is very expensive. It really boggles my mind considering that organic was how it was done for thousands of years. Why are we having to certify that as organic? But as far as organic goes, this is why it’s good to know your farmers. In San Antonio, I worked with a farmer. I knew her for years and years and she was not certified organic, but she did follow organic practices. That’s what really matters to me.  

I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing about eating local and seasonal, but the more I have learned about it, the more important I think it is for us. Food. has energy. That energy is designed for that season and location. If you think about what grows in the tropics versus what grows in a desert or even Texas climate, which is much hotter than the tropics, it’s different.  

When we eat out of season and we’re eating non local, you can confuse your pineal gland and your circadian rhythm, which ultimately can lead to lowered immunity and illness. Think of it this way, it seems a little odd to all the time be eating pineapple when it’s snowing outside. You don’t eat beef stew when it’s 100 degrees. That’s what seasonal means.  

And when we seek out foods that are local, they haven’t traveled as far, so they’re not as old and they’re fresher. You see, over time, foods will lose their nutritional value once they’ve been harvested. So the further they travel, the less nutrition they have.  

The ideal is to find local farmers, ranchers, and even eggs and milk. That way, you’re supporting your neighbors, your local economy. Another advantage is that local produce doesn’t wind up in the mega processing plants. You know, those plants where somebody had E. coli, and then the spinach gets contaminated, and then the country’s out of spinach for three or four weeks. Well, if it’s all local, it’s not processed there. The same is true of local meats and eggs and milk products, because they’re less likely to become contaminated.  

Something else that’s important is to seek out, as much as you can, foods without labels. Because those are your whole foods from the produce section and the meat section. But you still need to know how to read labels for those times when you have no other choice. And when you’re reading those labels, you don’t have to know what all the words mean on a label when you’re reading the ingredients. But if you don’t recognize them, then that’s a clue that it’s something that you wouldn’t find and you wouldn’t find it in a recipe. I also follow the rule of watching out for products with an ingredient list that’s TMI, which to me is too many ingredients. I do that primarily because I need to avoid certain things.  

Finally, when we’re talking ideal foods, we need to use traditional fats and oils. Some examples would be olive oil, butter, and tallow. By selecting traditional fats and oils, we avoid the highly processed and inflammatory oils. Those are all the invention of the food industry in an effort to have cheaper and longer shelf life oils, which is just a way for them to increase their profits.  

So to sum it up briefly, the ideal would be that we have whole food diets that are minimally processed foods. organic, seasonal and local, foods without labels, and that we use traditional fats and oils.

Thanks for listening today. If you have any comments on this episode or on the whole NaPodPoMo concept in general, you can visit this page to leave comments either on this page or at SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024. You can also find a listing and link for all November’s episodes on that same page: SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024.  

By the way, Self Powered Healing is still looking for interviews with people who want to share a story of healing. Do you have a healing story? I would love to hear about it and see if maybe you could share it on our show. So if you’re interested in sharing, then visit selfpoweredhealing.com/share to schedule a chat.  

You aren’t committing at this point. You’re just having a chat with me to see what’s going on. It will be confidential unless or until you decide you want to share. And if you get there and there’s not a convenient time for you, send me a message because we’ll always find a time.  

And remember this always,  